There is no other instrument as personal and based on experience as our own voice. Our voice tells who we are, what we feel, and how we are doing. Illnesses, injuries, and lifestyles are reflected in our voice. When we sing, laugh, shout, or whisper, we do it with our whole body. Our body resonates.

Our body has been played in different ways over the years by our parents, children, friends, and others we have met. Each of them has touched our voice in their own way, leaving a mark on our body. Often beautiful and soft, but sometimes also discordant or bruised. Those marks have been stored in our mind and body. Our body remembers and reacts to situations as it has learned to react over time, sometimes with tension, relaxation, and then again with defense or calm.

“It’s wonderful to sing alone in nature and listen to the echo or how nature responds. Joy sometimes just bursts out as song!”

In our singing, we hear the marks that have accumulated over time. Our voice echoes life, memories, the past. We hear the song of our feelings and the spectrum of our experiences. The voice tells the story of its carrier’s life.

“I would like to be a good singer, but unfortunately, I’m the daughter of an out-of-tune father, who can somewhat keep a note, but just doesn’t have the sound. So, nowadays, I mostly sing in the car, in nature, and to my youngest child, who asks for it. However, singing is important, it always touches the heart. It soothes, it feels good.”

Through the voice, we can touch our memories, some of which we may not even remember having experienced. By singing, we can awaken deep emotions, touching experiences, and moments of joy that seem to bubble to the surface. Song brings us into contact with our first feelings. The voice resonates within our body and plays our soul. Inside, we resonate.

There is never complete silence in nature. We hear the wind in the trees, the animals’ calls, the crack of a branch under a predator’s paw. Throughout history, humans have mimicked animal sounds to find a connection with their surroundings. The sounds helped us survive dangerous situations and comforted us during happy moments. The connection to nature calmed, gave strength, and created a strong bond between humans and the environment. Complete silence has been a sign of danger for humans, and even today it can feel unsettling. Sounds connect us to time, place, and other people.

“My grandmother sang to gather the cattle and taught us to sing in the dark so that we wouldn’t be scared. I use singing, for example, when riding in the forest when I’m nervous. Similarly, singing helps with stage fright.”

Humming and familiar melodies have kept the family together, creating a sense of security and belonging for its members. We humans feel safe when we hear human voices; even our own humming can make us feel calm and relaxed.

“As a child, my sister and I often went for evening walks to the lakeside and there we sang together, with the water supporting our voices. I have passed down the tradition of singing to my children. We sing both in nature and indoors. We don’t always sing perfectly in tune, but that’s not what we seek with our song.”

Relaxation

Nature calms and relaxes. It is an environment we are innately familiar with, offering a space conducive to recovery. Through relaxation, we gradually begin to observe our external environment and our inner emotional states—in other words, our presence strengthens.

Primitive, calming melodies for both newborns and adults are very similar across cultures. They are simple, often wordless song fragments sung over and over again. These few-note melodies often have a relaxing effect: “aa-aa-allin lasta…” An adult who feels insecure in a crisis situation craves the same comfort as a child. Our voice is a sensitive yet powerful tool for both emotional self-regulation and expression.

Each of us reacts to the vibration of sound in different ways, experiencing it both as a physiological vibration and as a psychological event. Our bodily senses stimulate various psychological processes.

Our image of the body is strengthened when we begin to feel our voice. We gain a positive experience of being in our own body—experiencing our own body. Feeling the vibration of sound helps us define where our body begins and where it ends. Stress-related symptoms have been shown to alleviate when an over-aroused state is brought down through the vibration of sound.

Preliminary research findings also show that, for example, the sound of a double bass transmitted to the human body caused subtle changes in muscle vibration patterns, suggesting that the muscles relax. When it’s possible to observe that bodily stimulation occurs, it can also be more widely utilized.

Well-Being Through Singing

The connection between nature and humans could almost be called an empowering process, involving both natural elements and spiritual ones. In the past, it was believed that nearly every element of nature, thing, or product obtained from nature had its own spirit or guardian. These often had their own voice, movement, or melody, which was called upon depending on the situation. Nature sang, and people sang in nature. Every natural element was associated with a sound. With their own voices, people have described any kind of space or event for centuries.

Many powerful vocal expressions have either lost their meaning and been forgotten or become subconscious. A dog barking attention, a parent shouting at their child, an adult moaning the sorrow of a loved one’s loss, or a patient shouting in pain—these are all remnants of primitive ways to use sound. But how many have heard the warning call of a roe deer?

“I sing in the wind and on high places when I feel good and free.”

These powerful voices, calls, warnings, and lamentations often resemble animal vocalizations. We sense things before we consciously understand them, and we act on instinct. In its simplest form, our voice expresses basic emotions—joy, fear, sadness, and anger—and these sounds are not always the most pleasant to the listener’s ear. Because our speech and singing voices are shaped by culture, community, and environment, we often suppress sounds that seem unpleasant, along with the emotions and experiences tied to them. Gradually, these suppressed sounds may transform into the voices of anxiety and depression.

Through singing, we can recognize our own emotions and express them instead of suppressing them. Singing allows us to channel our worries and sorrows, joys and sadness, to be present for ourselves and for others.

“When I sing, I feel life flowing through my veins.”

Brain research has shown that singing improves memory, mood, and concentration. Through music, we find new bridges to ourselves and others. Song carries many subconscious meanings, which we continue to understand and instinctively recognize. It functions almost as a second language, making it easier to convey emotions than when speaking.

In my own work, a key focus is the role of music as a tool for self-regulation. Self-regulation is a strategy that we create for ourselves to improve health, based on our background and experiences. We engage in self-regulation without external guidance. An example of primitive self-regulation is pain, which prompts us to avoid touching fire or boiling water, or the feeling of hunger, which tells us that our body needs food. More advanced forms of self-regulation include emotions and thoughts, which work in cooperation with environmental, mental, physical, or social strategies.

Music can serve as a tool for self-regulation in various ways. It may act as a background entertainment, a comfort in moments of sorrow, or a calming force amid restlessness. In my work as a vocal coach, the following strategies particularly stand out:

Recovery
After a stressful phase or experience, we crave rejuvenating moments to return to a normal state. These moments don’t have to be long: a break while listening to favorite music can already help us recover. Each of us has our own mental images that provide us with strength.

Experiences
When I first tried virtual glasses with my singing students in Germany, I noticed how looking at a nature picture—especially a pleasing nature image—almost always sparked a reaction of admiration. “Oh, what a beautiful landscape!” “Wow, how far I can see!” Looking at the picture through virtual glasses brought nature into the classroom in the middle of the busiest city. While watching the picture, the voice flowed out almost by itself. The students reported feeling good and found singing easier, along with forgetting themselves and their performance: “I didn’t think about technique, I just felt!” That sense of wonder—awe—creates an experiential moment that inspires action, enhances the sense of connection to the environment, and anchors us in the present, while our sense of time disappears.

Detachment
By detaching from everyday life, we release ourselves from the rush, demands, and concerns of the routine. We free ourselves from familiar roles, overly burdensome responsibilities, and external expectations. We are just as we are. Detachment from daily life can be enabled by changing locations, but it’s not always necessary to go far. The change can be something other than a physical journey: we can detach through music or the image created by music.

Imagery Work
Music gives wings to the imagination and a bridge for thoughts, allowing us to travel from one image to another. We use imagery work in vocal coaching by visualizing a landscape and humming through the feelings it evokes. Through imagery, we have the opportunity to process different emotional experiences with sound and music, and it’s often experienced as a very relaxing working method.

It has been found that music is a safe way to process difficult emotions. Psychical processes can be reflected in musical structures, and the symbolic distance of music can make it easier to deal with even the most difficult issues (Ahonen, 1993). Song gives form to the experience. With rhythm, experiences take structure. The melody’s notes shape themselves according to the flow of thought and changes in the mind. This creates a space for the singer to express emotions. Lyrics provide meaning to the song and trigger processes of focus, memory, symbolic play, and metaphor. Together, these elements create a musical vessel where one can experience a sense of safety.

With the support of song, we can continue to search for new things, learn, develop, or even relax.

Music and Emotions

About ten years ago, one of my students brought a cartoon from a magazine to my class, her eyes shining. In the comic, the teacher was teaching her student with intensity and encouragement: “Music must stir emotions!!!”

Through my own artistic work, I’ve been interested in the collaboration between music and emotions from an early stage, uncovering and analyzing the mechanisms of communication, and striving to convey them forward. One of the major aha moments was the intonation line we developed with students, when we searched for a way to get to the core of singing in a language other than our own. We identified the prosodic elements of spoken language (stress, pitch, and articulation) and, through these, created an intonation line, which we added to the score along with the text, harmony, and melody. It felt like singing often lacked true understanding, but by opening up prosody, a channel was created for the singer’s own emotional experience.

Tuomas Eerola presents prosody as the earliest model of combining music and emotion in his article “Evolutionary Psychology and Music.” This primitive mechanism related to speech and music concerns detecting the emotional charge in all kinds of vocalizations. Already the musical communication between mother and baby is a process of emotional regulation.

A mother’s song soothes and lulls, or in the midst of play, activates and calls attention to the singer. A mother’s voice and the listening to music shape our auditory landscape even before our birth, and the newborn can recognize familiar melodies.

Our favorite music is a strong stimulus for the brain, activating the pleasure centers of the brain. This kind of pre-linguistic communication between mother and baby has been essential for survival.

What exactly are emotions? Basic emotions—joy, sorrow, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust—are automatic reactions shaped by evolution to environmental stimuli. Emotions are short-lived, unlike moods, which can last longer. Personally, I have expressed my emotions through music since childhood. Singing has allowed emotions to flow freely, and I’ve even been able to process emotions as they arise, transferring them into music.

In stressful life situations, familiar and safe music, as well as the natural environment, help in recovery by guiding us closer to our emotional experiences. Music also anchors memories. Patrick N. Juslin and Daniel Västerfjäll, who study music and emotion, call this conditioning: we learn to associate music with positive or negative experiences.

Other emotional experiences created by music include reflexes—emotional experiences that arise when reacting to surprising sounds within music—and identification, where the body empathizes with music.

Singing is often like looking at pictures and memories for me. Songs evoke images and memories of past moments, often those I experienced particularly strongly. According to Juslin and Västerfjäll, music often raises images, which originate from the structure of the music and correspond to its visual expression.

The Songland – My Place

We humans are especially sensitive to adapting to our environment. Urban environments may have even changed the way we use our voices. From barefoot and flat-soled shoes, we have moved to high heels. Our body posture has changed, and the tensions in our bodies have grown. We shape our voice from the low, steady speech of formal conversations to the warm speech of maternal and sensual encounters. We have distanced ourselves from the earth.

Studies show that we have a strong, childhood-rooted tendency to bond with our environment. Nature environments have been shown to reduce stress symptoms and speed up recovery from strain faster than urban environments. According to studies, childhood natural landscapes are particularly effective environments for supporting recovery from stress. We feel at home in landscapes similar to those where we grew up.

A familiar landscape supports our mental well-being. We not only enjoy nature, but we also know how to function in it. We know the rocks and stumps, we walk familiar paths, we remember the hazards, and we know how to navigate our way.

In a stressful phase of life, a familiar environment supports and sustains a person. Researchers have suggested that spending time and engaging in activities in childhood landscapes might help the self-regulation process for those suffering from prolonged stress, aiding in recovery and healing.

Close your eyes, breathe slowly at your own pace. Feel the flow of your breath in your body, don’t try to change anything. Recall the childhood landscape, the lakeshore, the shelter of the forest, the law of the hill. Quietly hum as you watch the landscape in your mind. Let the landscape affect you, hum familiar surroundings, breathe in the peace of nature.

“When I was young, ‘my’ natural place was important, where I hummed and sang to myself. When singing in nature, the songs change according to the mood and emotions—sometimes humming, sometimes singing, and sometimes just remembering the melody and words in my mind.”

The relationship between nature and humans has been compared to the relationship between a child and mother. Moments experienced in nature bring to mind the care and safety of childhood. In the early stages of recovery, a calm environment has been shown to bring up positive, primal feelings of joy and curiosity, which can promote recovery. As the recovery process progresses and we feel stronger, we can move into environments that present more challenges, to new winds and landscapes, to mountain slopes, the bow of a sailboat, or the pedals of a mountain bike.

By recognizing the natural environment to which we belong, we can form an almost therapeutic relationship with nature. Our soul’s landscape supports us in the recovery process when the strain feels overwhelming.

(Excerpt from the book Luonnon aika – Relaxing Moments in Nature)

“The robin flew to a branch in front of my nose while I was collecting mushrooms and humming. It tilted its head and chirped, fluttering in front of me for several minutes. I could have touched it with my hand. It must have liked the Vesterinen ‘Tanssimaan’ song.”

Genuine Interaction in Nature and with Sound

By surrendering to interaction with nature, we become a living part of our surroundings. Being in interaction inevitably changes our relationship with nature. True environmental protection is experiencing and understanding that interaction, the shared breathing between nature and people who act in harmony with nature.

This is an exercise I do with almost every group when we go into nature:

Place your hand on the tree’s bark and breathe slowly in and out a few times. Then hold your breath for a moment. Do you feel yourself disconnecting from the tree? Now return your breath and breathe together with the tree. With your inhale, the tree gives you the oxygen and energy it produces. With your exhale, the carbon dioxide in your breath nourishes the tree. Hold your breath again. Feel the changes in your body and your connection to the tree. Alternate between breathing and holding your breath. You may notice the interaction gradually strengthening.